Remarkable Memes

Just blame Maile.  Because of Maile Lono-Batura, executive director of Northwest Biosolids, I have spent (wasted?) several hours trying to figure out “memes.”  According to the website 50 Internet Memes that Have Won Our Hearts: Viral humor, bizarre curiosities, and infectious storytelling, “Memes are cultural symbols and social ideas that spread virally. The meme content itself is usually something of minor every day. The noteworthy aspect of a meme is its infectious nature: It invites people to spread it through social media, email, and photo-sharing.”

Did you get that? Memes are those pesky distractions you get when you are moving through the internet, something catches your attention, and, suddenly, you are off course.  Clearly, I don’t get distracted enough or I would not have missed The Extreme Diet Coke & Mentos Experiments and Build Your Own Demotivational Calendar. Had I come across this “meme,” featuring one of my heroes, I would have been guilty of assisting its “virality:” Mr. Rogers Remixed: Garden of Your Mind. But believe it or not, I had no idea that number one on the list of “50 favorite memes” is the meme “Be Like Bill,” for which I am flattered, sort of.  Be Like Bill is “a passive-aggressive meme, featuring a stick figure, that comments on people's life choices.”  For example, “This is Bill. Bill is on the Internet. Bill sees something that offends him. Bill moves on. Bill is smart. Be Like Bill.” I guess that is what happens when I see a post from a familiar anti-biosolids activists.

Maile and I were discussing viral internet postings last week.  I mentioned I had heard an interview on TED Radio Hour with internet marketer/blogger Seth Godin.  Godin’s website urges us to “Go make something happen,”  which I try to do every day, but with small effect. In his TED Radio Hour interview, What makes an idea go viral , Godin says that for ideas to go viral they need be “remarkable.” That is, the idea or product is so engaging that people are motivated to “remark” to family, friends and others about the idea. Hence, spontaneous person-to-person remarks make the idea go viral.

In our biosolids world, very few of us have the goal for our biosolids to be “remarkable,” because the remarks are usually of the wrong kinds, and they go viral for the wrong reasons.  That is what we need to change. We need to tell our “remarkable” stories, and we need positive viral results.

Maile and I mused over what it would take for the biosolids profession to tell “remarkable” stories. This is when Maile told me about crickets. A Portland based company, Cricket Flours, poses on its website the question: “Are You Ready for Crickets? Natural, sustainable, protein,” and goes on to explain “Cricket Flours LLC was founded in 2014 to provide an environmentally friendly and sustainable source of protein and nutrition for the world’s expanding population.”

But it is a Brooklyn NY company using cricket flour that introduced a unique communication approach, with a useful lesson for biosolids. Exo Protein is a start-up enterprise founded in 2013 by two Brown University graduates who, following a lecture on sustainable business, came up with the idea of manufacturing high protein nutrition bars using cricket flour.   The company is pumping along happily with their Exo Cricket Protein Bar when it unexpectedly starts getting nasty posts on its comment page. The good folks at Exo Protein were stunned.  As the company explains on its website: “We’ve also received our share of hate mail, from internet trolls to the flat-out squeamish. Some of these comments are simply too great to keep to ourselves. Check out the best (worst?) below. And to all of them we say: Haters Gonna Hate.”

“Haters Gonna Hate” is a meme. According to LifeWire: “'Haters gonna hate' is an expression of personal pride and individuality. It means 'I'm just going to ignore the cruel and hateful comments of other people'. The 'haters gonna hate' expression is commonly used when a person (or animal) performs some kind of public strutting move that demonstrates individuality, and that person wants to shout, 'I don't care what other people think!'
If there is a meme that biosolids managers might be able to embrace for themselves, when confronted by media and local opposition, it is “haters gonna hate.”

Exo Protein’s hate comments, which they posted bravely on its website, included these two: “You “environmentally conscious” morons can eat bugs and #$%$ for all I care” and “How much longer before these idiots try to get us to eat our own #$%$?“.

We have here a literary conflation of icky bugs and poop. I wasn’t expecting this, but it struck a chord. 
I was reminded of a paper I presented at the 1998 WEF RBC Opening General Session, “The Horror, Humor and Heroes of Biosolids.” I opened up with a news article that featured a very special biosolids utilization outlet: hamburgers.  Fortunately, Google has archived the article from World Weekly News: The World’s Only Reliable News. You can read it for yourself. “Potty Patties: Hamburgers made from raw sewage are a big hit in Japan.” 
Back in 1998 I had tracked down and reported on the very, very small kernel of truth behind this story. Here is what I wrote: “The Japanese actually did undertake this research!  Mr. Tomozane, in an email message to me, writes ‘We have now completed the project of creating artificial meat from the sludge left over after waste water treatment and have a real product.  We have both dried out meat for immediate usage and we also preserve the meat by storing it in vacuum packs… We have further plans to investigate and research into new areas of using extracted protein for valid purposes.’ “

To my delight, the “urban legend” of sewage to hamburger did not die in 1998.  In 2011, we read:  Japanese scientist creates 'poop burger'? Surely not: “A Japanese scientist reportedly finds a way to do something ecologically useful: create artificial meat from sewage containing feces. But doesn't the story smell just a little funny?”  This comes complete with a YouTube video Solution to the Global Food Crisis - Let them eat TURD BURGERS.

I think this article is further evidence that our culture is turning the corner on its relationship to poop management.

Have you seen the short film Gut Hack?  Biohacker Josiah Zayner has been plagued by gastrointestinal pain: “Rather than swigging some Pepto-Bismol, Zayner has other ideas, searching for someone ‘hopefully really athletic and attractive’ to swap out bacteria with to see if it’ll improve his health.”   He swallowed home-made capsules of donated feces. His gut microbiome was transformed, and he was restored to good gastrointestinal health.

Popular culture is embracing the gut microbiome and its effect on our health. A Johns Hopkins website describes Fecal transplantation (or bacteriotherapy):“This is the transfer of stool from a healthy donor into the gastrointestinal tract for the purpose of treating recurrent C. difficile colitis.”   We learn from the Open Biome website about  Fecal Microbiota Transplantation, and we learn How to Own Your Gut Bacteria and Fix Leaky Gut Syndrome. Even more extreme, in line with “Gut Hack,” we can learn The Power of Poop, with “DIY Fecal Transplants at Home.” At home?!
I sense from the “meme” interest in this topic that we may be witnessing in society decreasing “fecaphobia,” broadening interest in the cycle of wastewater, and newly positive associations with “germs.” AsapSCIENCE, with funding by SquareSpace  (coincidentally MABA’s new website host) produced this supportive description of The Poop Cycle.  I can tell you from personal experience how exciting it was to receive my gut microbe profile from American Gut; I have 13 times more organisms of the genus Prevotella than is typical in the U.S.  NYC Radiolab, which has done the biosolids industry great service by producing two programs: Poop Train (9/24/2013)  and The Sludge at the Bottom of the Sea (11/13/2013), this past week featured a story, Funky Hand Jive, describing the transmission of microbes by handshakes.

Radiolab’s special guest for this “handshake” show was astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.  Dr. Tyson is one of the nation’s most recognized science popularizer, filling holes left by Carl Sagan’s death and David Attenborough’s age. The 1 May 2017 issue of Chemical and Engineering News acknowledged Dr. Tyson’s importance, in a commentary by the 2017 American Chemical Society president Allison A. Campbell, Communicating science effectively to the public. Her concern, reflecting on the March for Science demonstrations this past Earth Day, was that “Social media, predominant as they are today, amplify the perceived risks of communicating with the nonscientific public.” She urged us to move past the perceived risk and instead to commit to communicating the science behind our work. She suggested we adopt four principles: understand the audience, tell good stories, speak plainly, and play the long game.

We certainly have a way to go, as we prefer to talk to ourselves, tell complicated stories, use jargon, and worry about tomorrow’s news articles.

And, we resist being remarkable.  I don’t have a good answer yet on the kind of “remarkable” meme that would spark a positive, viral interest in biosolids recycling. It might have elements of ‘Haters Gonna Hate’ and ‘Gut Hack’, but I would prefer it come from the kind of work that is done in support of compost by Kiss the Ground, which celebrates the role of microbes in the soil-food web and in building soil health.

I spoke to Charlotte’s Jean Creech last week. She said she was taking the cue from California Association of Sanitation Agencies and Northwest Biosolids to turn the conversation away from nutrients, regulations and risk and toward soil health. This is where we can tell our remarkable stories. This is  the foundational “long game” issue, and we can focus on good results, not on technologies. We need to keep our audience in mind, or in this case, the REMARKABLE MEME IN MIND.

Hot Stuff in Landfills?

My spouse shook my world the other day!  A tedious conference call at work had her scrolling her Facebook feed, and, as she is a nerd like me, her feed has some great science stories. I was busy with my own biosolids science inquiry, so I was inclined at first to ignore her FB messenger notes.

But how can you ignore Records Found in Dusty Basement Undermine Decades of Dietary Advice? We all know a plant-based diet is the pathway to good health. But National Institutes of Health employee Christopher Ramsden had uncovered a trove of 9,000 patient files of a seminal nutrition study completed 40 year ago, the data from which, when reanalyzed, turned upside down the conventional wisdom that a diet high in saturated fats increased risk of deaths due to heart disease. The data showed the opposite!

What?! I have been eating bean burgers when my health would have been better served by beef burgers?

And, a short while later, another FB Messenger note from my wife excitedly urged me to read about plastic-eating waxworms. We all know that the health of soils and oceans, on which human existence depends, is ultimately doomed by accumulation of plastic, particularly of the micro kind.  But here the LA Times was announcing, in Stubborn plastic may have finally met its match: the hungry wax worm, “researchers set wax worms loose on a polyethylene film, watching holes appear after just 40 minutes… So far, the scientists are not sure whether this ability is due to the wax moth larva, or to the microbes within its gut.”  I went to Google Scholar to find, despite being a faithful reader of Engineering Science & Technology, I had missed an article back in November 2014 (Evidence of polyethylene biodegradation by bacterial strains from the guts of plastic-eating waxworms) announcing “the results demonstrated the presence of PE-degrading bacteria in the guts of waxworms and provided promising evidence for the biodegradation of PE in the environment.”

I should have known, gut bacteria are the heroes; they even eat plastic. Maybe humanity is not doomed, not yet at least, by plastic.

All of this “news” had distracted me from my own biosolids investigation of the bizarre. I had been uncovering a wholly unexpected adverse environmental effect of biosolids.  Let me hasten to say, there is NO FIRM EVIDENCE, not yet at least, that biosolids is responsible for this: Elevated Temperature Landfills.  

For the better part of 30 years I have held the firm conviction that biosolids co-disposal with municipal solid waste (MSW) is a win-win, filling in space-wasting voids in the emplaced trash, hastening biogas production and accelerating settling. Biosolids co-disposal is so beneficial for MSW landfills that it warrants a discounted tipping fee, I would argue (unsuccessfully so with landfill companies).

What I know is true, like plastic is forever and animal fat ruins hearts, may not be true!

Eminent emeritus Virginia Tech professor John Novak had first planted the doubt, which I mostly ignored. In his keynote presentation to the 2015 WEF biosolids conference, Dr. Novak darkly warned, almost off-handedly, against over reliance on co-disposal at landfills, as disposal challenges go beyond odors. In a casual follow-up conversation with Dr. Novak I first heard the phrase “elevated temperatures.”

There the matter lay, until the recent 2017 WEF Conference in Seattle. From another industry insider, I learned a research project had been launched to study Elevated Temperature Landfills (ETLF). This was no small investigation. Major companies had gotten together to fund it. A highly-credentialed team had been assembled. Some extraordinary situations had been reported by the press. 

I did some Internet sleuthing and followed with interviewing. The Environmental Research and Education Foundation, formed as a research arm of the solid waste industry in 1998, requested proposal to study ETLF in 2015, resulting in CCL receives Environmental Research & Education Foundation (EREF) funds research grant on elevated landfill temperatures.  This team is led by Dr. Marco J. Castaldi, an engineering professor at the City University of New York (CUNY) and includes Dr. Morton A. Barlaz, professor at North Carolina State University.  A PowerPoint presentation posted by Dr. Barlaz, Heat Generation and Accumulation at Municipal Solid Waste Landfills Experiencing Elevated Temperatures, provides eye-popping descriptions of ETLF at work and the importance of the new study.

A Google search points to at least one shocking situation. The online waste industry publication Waste360 has tackled this topic, first with a March 2016 overview ( Elevated Landfill Temperatures a Concern for Operators ) and then with a three-part series of articles on elevated temperature landfills ( Diagnosing and Understanding Elevated Temperature Landfills ).  In November 2016, Waste360 provided  The Bridgeton Landfill "Fire" Explained (Updated), in which the story of the St. Louis, Missouri, landfill owned by Republic Services, is described.  This is already national news, albeit National Public Radio:  Landfill Fire Threatens Nuclear Waste Site Outside St. Louis.  According to the NPR article, “Specifically, Acting EPA Regional Administrator Mark Hague says there is "no imminent threat" of the underground fire in what's known as the Bridgeton Landfill reaching the radioactive waste at the adjacent West Lake Landfill.”

Do you feel reassured?

Another research team in Louisiana is “hot” on the trail of symptoms and causes of elevated temperature landfills. Navid H. Jafari is the lead author of Spatial and temporal characteristics of elevated temperatures in municipal solid waste landfills. The authors state: “In particular, MSW landfills undergo changes in behavior that typically follow a progression of indicators, e.g., elevated temperatures, changes in gas composition, elevated gas pressures, increased leachate migration, slope movement, and unusual and rapid surface settlement.”

So far, no mention of biosolids in on-line PowerPoints or by the media.

Nevertheless, the hallway conversation in Seattle turned to a recent tragedy at Greentree Landfill in Kersey, PA, this past February.  One article among many is Worker’s Body Found After Being Buried In Trash At Pa. Landfill.  The speculation heard in Seattle is that the surface instability at Greentree arose from a “hot spot” associated with a high proportion of biosolids disposal accepted at this landfill. 

When Waste Management, Inc., (WM) took steps in February 2015 to change its policies on biosolids acceptance, the principal assumption was its impetus was odor complaints.  That this step should apply to WM’s Pennsylvania facilities seemed to be reasonable (Pennsylvania Orders Waste Management to Close Tullytown Landfill by 2017). After all, NYC DEP, a major customer at the time, does not certify its biosolids as compliant with Class B pathogen standards or with Vector Attraction Reduction standards, and Pennsylvania regulations seem to require this level of stabilization for landfill acceptance.

But WM’s policy on biosolids co-disposal may include other considerations – for instance a risk of elevated temperature.  A recently retired WM engineer explained in a recent interview that no WM landfills receiving a proportion of biosolids lower than 10 percent of daily trash acceptance had displayed problems with elevated temperatures. While this is not a basis for a cause/effect relationship, if you are a landfill operator a reasonable course of action is to impose a 10% maximum acceptance rate for biosolids. That is what WM did in 2015.  Other landfill owners, including Greentree’s, did not.

But how could biosolids be involved with elevated temperatures?  In Waste360’s  Diagnosing and Understanding Elevated Temperature Landfills (Part 3), the authors suggest the reaction is  “Pyrolysis… the thermochemical decomposition of organic matter at elevated temperature in the absence of oxygen.”  As a follower of the WE&RF LIFT program, I recalled the proposal from a start-up enterprise, HydroTORR’s ZIP-Carb (Zero Input Process Carbonization), deploying hydrothermal carbonization (HTC), a wet-state thermal decomposition under elevated temperature and pressure in an oxygen starved environment, very pyrolysis-like.  That modern landfills are hundreds of feet thick, totally insulated, oxygen-free and wet with recirculating leachate, internal conditions are seemingly consonant with HTC.

One researcher involved with HydroTORR is Dr. M Toufiq Reza, formerly of University of Nevada, now at Ohio University, Athens. He has a specialization in “applied bioenergy.” When I put my hypothesis to him, Dr. Reza gave it a few hours consideration and in an email back to me suggested that high strength leachate combined with biosolids sealed in waste cells under pressure “might go for an exothermic decarboxilation reaction resulting in CO₂ and heat.” These are the two key indicators of elevated temperature landfills.  

The science is still not there to link biosolids and elevated temperatures, at least not yet. But, if science can surprise me with contrary conclusions on plastic and lard, it can surprise me with contrary conclusions on biosolids in landfills.

I participated in the March for Science in Philadelphia on Earth Day. It was a perfect venue for me to recommit to keeping science front and center with biosolids. Dr. Reza wrote: “To test the hypothesis, I may need to test the leachate sludge and aged-sludge.”  He stands ready to do some research, and I invite you to join me in elevating the SCIENCE OF HOT BIOSOLIDS.

PFAS: Stick with Biosolids

When I bought a lipstick-red Prius a few years back, I thought mine was unique, but, of course, I started seeing identical ones everywhere. It is the same with a class of compounds called here perfluoroalkyl substances, abbreviated as PFAS, but also known as perfluorinated compounds. I hardly noticed them at all until Ned Beecher’s recent conference call to discuss a serious, evolving regulatory issue in New England. Now PFAS seem to be everywhere, literally and figuratively.

In a short two week, both MABA and NEBRA website have posted PFAS information. Of particular importance, and as a “first stop” for a detailed overview of the PFAS biosolids issue, is Beecher’s “Fact Sheet & Talking Points – Perfluorinated Substances in Biosolids.” If you intend to track this issue, watch for the “PFAS & Biosolids Webinar,” tentatively scheduled for Monday, May 8th at 1 pm (look for an announcement at the NEBRA Events page). As a MABA member, you have likely seen Dr. Sally Brown’s latest “blurb” entitled “Tight Bonds.”

If you are like me, you are way behind on your background reading on PFAS.  When I started, I was taken aback at how this class of compounds had been implicated in some bad, though still unproved health effects. The EPA put out a 2014 document, Health Effects Document for Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA), which was the basis of the 70 ppt “lifetime health advisory” for drinking water.  The Centers for Disease Control issued a serious overview of PFAS exposure for use by clinicians with patients living in contaminated areas, available also on the web.  In the report Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances and human fetal growth: A systematic review, the authors report “[H]igher PFOS and PFOA concentrations were associated with decreased average birth weight in most studies, but only some results were statistically significant. The impact on public health is unclear, but the global exposure to PFASs warrants further investigation.”  The report Association between perfluoroalkyl substance exposure and asthma and allergic disease in children as modified by MMR vaccination concluded that “Perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) are highly persistent chemicals that might be associated with asthma and allergy, but the associations remain unclear.”

When scientists looked at human body burdens of PFAS, clearly everyone everywhere is exposed. Even the Arctic is not spared (Perfluorinated Acids in Arctic Snow:  New Evidence for Atmospheric Formation).The massive, 1,774 page CDC report and update, Fourth National Report on Human Exposure to Environmental Chemicals, showed that, while white males had somewhat higher concentrations in their blood, no one, regardless of age or race, is without a body burden of perfluorinated compounds. One hopeful note is that over the past 15 years serum concentrations have declined significantly, approximately 70%, following the removal of the compounds from many consumer products. Also, a positive feature is that the half-life of these compounds in the human body is a little over two years: (Occurrence and Potential Significance of Perfluorooctanoic Acid (PFOA) Detected in New Jersey Public Drinking Water Systems”)

So where are PFAS coming from? EPA’s report discovered environmental hotspots, such as manufacturing locations, fire training facilities, and airports.  But, according to Impacts of daily intakes on the isomeric profiles of perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in human serum “[d]ietary intake contributed > 99% of the estimated daily intake (EDI) for the general population...” The report Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFASs) in Food and Human Dietary Intake: A Review of the Recent Scientific Literature, claimed that “fish and other seafood seem to be the food group in which more PFASs are detected and where the concentrations of these compounds are higher.”  This was the case, too, for wild-caught bass in Comparison of perfluoroalkyl substances contamination in farmed and wild-caught European sea bass (Dicentrarchus labrax).  PFAS are in food packaging:  Fluorinated Compounds in U.S. Fast Food Packaging explains that “The prevalence of fluorinated chemicals in fast food packaging demonstrates their potentially significant contribution to dietary PFAS.” PFAS have entered our food from Teflon cookware and microwave popcorn: Quantitation of Gas-Phase Perfluoroalkyl Surfactants and Fluorotelomer Alcohols Released from Nonstick Cookware and Microwave Popcorn Bags.  But, thankfully, these sources are being withdrawn from the marketplace and from human use.

PFAS are in indoor and outdoor dust. The paper from Korea, Human exposure to per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) via house dust in Korea: Implication to exposure pathway, determined that “house-dust ingestion was a minor contributor in this study, but should not be ignored for toddlers….” And a nation-wide study found “substantial levels” throughout China, Nationwide Distribution of Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances in Outdoor Dust in Mainland China From Eastern to Western Areas.

Among these several sources, tap water is the big issue for people and biosolids.  The first issues arose with tap water contaminated by local manufacturing activities.  In the report Detection of Poly- and Perfluoroalkyl Substances (PFASs) in U.S. Drinking Water Linked to Industrial Sites, Military Fire Training Areas, and Wastewater Treatment Plants “We find drinking water supplies for 6 million U.S. residents exceed US EPA’s lifetime health advisory (70 ng/L) for PFOS and PFOA.” New England has a few such sources, hence Ned’s urgency, but in the mid-Atlantic, Parkersburg, WV, is the home of a former DuPont Teflon plant, with a sad legacy of PFAS, reported by WV Public Broadcasting in October 2016.

The research conversation quickly turned to wastewater and biosolids.  Mass Loading and Fate of Perfluoroalkyl Surfactants in Wastewater Treatment Plants reported that “PFOS and PFOA are known to be non-biodegradable by an activated sludge process…. Therefore, a reduction in mass flow following activated sludge treatment was neither expected nor observed.”  Further, “This study provides further evidence that PFAS are not removed from wastewater by conventional treatment. An effective strategy for reducing their contamination of the environment should include the removal of PFAS and their precursors from domestic, commercial, and industrial sources.”

One famous horror story is given in Application of WWTP biosolids and resulting perfluorinated compound contamination of surface and well water in Decatur, Alabama, USA, which “describes a situation in Decatur, Alabama, where PFC contaminated biosolids from a local municipal wastewater treatment facility that had received waste from local fluorochemical facilities were used as a soil amendment in local agricultural fields for as many as twelve years.” Biosolids-borne PFAS were implicated in groundwater contamination. 

How much PFAS can you expect in biosolids. Rolf Halden at the University of Arizona weighed in with his National inventory of perfluoroalkyl substances in archived U.S. biosolids from the 2001 EPA National Sewage Sludge Survey,  which reported a national average for the dominant compound in biosolids, perfluorooctane sulfonate (PFOS), at approximately 400 ng/g dry weight.  

Analysis of more current samples show much lower concentrations today. Perfluoroalkyl substances (PFASs) in wastewater treatment plants and drinking water treatment plants: Removal efficiency and exposure risk reported the “average total PFASs concentrations in the three selected WWTPs were 19.6–232 ng/L in influents, 15.5–234 ng/L in effluents, and 31.5–49.1 ng/g dry weight in sludge.” Temporal trends of perfluoroalkyl substances in limed biosolids from a large municipal water resource recovery facility  is an important time series of measurements from Washington, DC, in which “the highest mean concentrations observed over the study period were 25.1 ng/g dw, 23.5 ng/g dw, and 22.5 ng/g dw for perfluorononanoic acid (PFNA), perfluorooctanoic acid (PFOA), and perfluorooctanesulfonic acid (PFOS), respectively…”  These recent studies confirm that today’s values are about an order of magnitude lower than those values reported for National Repository biosolids.

The million-dollar question is what happens when biosolids are land applied? We have only a few clear field studies, and some questionable pot studies. To start with, biosolids carry the larger-chain PFAS. While these resist movement in soil, microbial action mobilizes them as shorter chain compounds. Occurrence and fate of perfluorochemicals in soil following the land application of municipal biosolids showed that “trace levels of PFCs were also detected in soil cores from biosolids-amended soils to depths of 120 cm, suggesting potential movement of these compounds within the soil profile over time and confirming the higher transport potential for short-chain PFCs in soils amended with municipal biosolids.” Ed Topp in Canada looked at the pathway of PFAS from biosolids to tile drains (Brominated flame retardants and perfluoroalkyl acids in groundwater, tile drainage, soil, and crop grain following a high application of municipal biosolids to a field.) Under conditions in which the pathway is short between plowed-in biosolids and tiles, “Exponential dissipation of …  [PFCs] in [biosolids] aggregates were not significant…. {though] No [PFCs] were detected in wheat grain.” The finding on plant uptake was reassuring.

Beecher is dealing with several closely related issues in New Hampshire. What had been an advisory level put out by EPA was grabbed by state regulators as a criterion. Evidence of PFAS transport in groundwater from an industrially contaminated site is seen by state regulators as prima facie rationale for regulating land applied biosolids bearing PFAS. Regulators are tempted by “low hanging fruit” to impose a ban on land application.

Biosolids professionals are putting a stake in the ground for “sound science.” At each step in the environmental exposure chain – wastewater treatment, biosolids stabilization, land spreading/incorporation, groundwater withdrawal, and crop update -- the connection needs to be scientifically understood before regulations are imposed.  Decades of good biosolids recycling practices urge us to Stick with Biosolids.

Still Not A Rose

I am a science nerd and always have been. Just this week I got real excited by ”Harvesting therapeutic proteins from animal slobber” in this week’s  (2/22/2017) Chemical & Engineering News, just as I was about “Slow-release nitrogen fertilizer could increase crop yields: A new nanoparticle-based fertilizer…” in the same issue. I spend several hours a week updating my EndNote database, where I have catalogued over 3,000 science journal articles. I received my tee-shirt this week: March for Science – Earth Day 2017. I occasionally, for fun, visit the  National Center for Emerging and Zoonotic Infectious Diseases (NCEZID) just to catch up. I jump at the chance to encourage people to listen to The Great Courses audio lecture series Earth's Changing Climate.

I take science seriously, which explains my annoyance at seeing the negative news clipping below and receiving word that David L Lewis is again pretending to be an honest whistleblower scientist fired by the US EPA over his opposition to Part 503 regulations.  Apparently a new documentary is in the works featuring Lewis as a hero: How EPA Faked the Entire Science of Sewage Sludge Safety: A Whistleblower’s Story.  It was just in January that I started out a newsletter noting that "David Lewis, long-retired from EPA but not from anti-biosolids activism, has posted to the United Sludge Free Alliance his 'recommendation for a new EPA Clean Soil Standard'.”   And this week I learned that Caroline Snyder has been stirring up folks in eastern Pennsylvania that there are no science articles showing biosolids is safe. THIS IS NOT TRUE!

Lewis’s argument of biosolids risk is absurd on its face. Virtually every state and federal regulatory system accommodates and supports biosolids recycling; that is hundreds of environmental regulators. Virtually every scientific article finds positive attributes of biosolids use in soils; I have 600 such references, authored by probably more than 1,500 scientists. The wastewater profession backs this practice; WEF counts itself having 33,000 members. For DL Lewis to be on the right side of this issue, these scientists, engineers, and regulators would need to be in some sort of mass conspiracy. How can rational media reporters be so blind to this absurdity?

The “fake news” story that is told around biosolids follows common themes of mythology. A number of years ago, Pulitzer Prize winning science writer Jon Franklin explored this theme in “Biosolids Hits the Fan” presentation to the opening general session the last time the national biosolids conference was held in the Seattle vicinity.

This argument has also been provided a veneer of respectability by several journal articles, now over a decade ago. Lewis made that case in Interactions of pathogens and irritant chemicals in land-applied sewage sludges (biosolids). He speculated that “an increased risk of infection may occur when allergic and non-allergic reactions to endotoxins and other chemical components irritate skin and mucus membranes and thereby compromise normal barriers to infection.”

Works by other familiar anti-biosolids activists have appeared in technical journals. Today’s most active activist, Carolyn Snyder, authored in 2005 for the International Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health the article The Dirty Work of Promoting “Recycling” of America's Sewage Sludge. Helane Shields authored in 2003 for an online publication, NEW SOLUTIONS: A Journal of Environmental and Occupational Health Policy, an ominously titled article Sludge Victims: Voices from the Field.  And in that same year and in the same publication, a more extensive treatment of the claims of biosolids-related illness was set forth by Cornell Waste Management Institute’s Ellen Z Harrison, Investigation of Alleged Health Incidents Associated with Land Application of Sewage Sludges: “Residents near land application sites report illness. Symptoms of more than 328 people involved in 39 incidents in 15 states are described.” A journal article with a theme linking biosolids use to environmental justice is Public Officials’ Perspectives on Tracking and Investigating Symptoms Reported Near Sewage Sludge Land Application Sites.  The authors of this paper observed: “Residents living close to treated farmland have reported becoming ill following land application of sludge. No systematic tracking or investigation of these reports or of land application practices that could affect off-site migration of chemical and biological constituents of the sludge has occurred, however.”

These “science” articles share the specific feature that neighbors to land application sites are self-reporting symptoms of ill health.  This is not medical science.  Medical science is founded on objective measurements and on plausible mechanisms linking pathogens or toxins to health effects. These standards of medical science are not met with self-reported illnesses. 

Nevertheless, WERF (now WE&RF) actively responded to these wide-spread and persistent public concerns. It sponsored research leading to the 2005 report. Health Effects of Biosolids Odors: A Literature Review and Analysis.  This review was followed by WERF’s more proactive Epidemiologic Surveillance and Investigation of Illness Reported by Neighbors of Biosolids Land Application Sites, Phase 1, “a draft protocol designed to be used by local, state, and federal health and environmental officials,” and by Pilot Testing: Surveillance and Investigation of the Illness Reported by Neighbors of Biosolids Land Application and Other Soil Amendments, which tested the protocol.  This project had its bumps in the road, in part because the Phase 1 authors were in disagreement with the focus and findings as they were shaped by the project review team. One underlying issue is this: are people who believe they have been sickened by biosolids exposure in fact experiencing ill health?

I took a shot at the issue of whether, in the absence of pathogen and toxicant exposures, can biosolids make people sick? I had been put on to this topic by Dr. William Cain, the principal investigator of WERF”s first report on health effects, in a visit to his odor lab shortly after his WERF report was complete. He explained that the chemical sensing system, particularly the trigeminal nerves in the nose, could be triggered by biosolids odors and that odor triggers could cause physical reactions, even subconscious ones. After a long, circuitous path of journal reading, I set this argument down in 2007 in Biosolids Odorant Emissions as a Cause of Somatic Disease: What Ought to be Our Profession’s Response?  I convinced myself that we, as environmental professionals, ignore odor complaints at our peril. My basic argument is that we can reasonably predict that someone in a community affected by biosolids odors may become fearful and experience physical manifestations of panic arising from odors, not pathogens.

Over the past ten years, scientific tools for investigating pathogens and exposures are increasingly sensitive and affordable. Has science raised the level of concerns with biosolids-borne toxicants and pathogens? The short answer is no.

But we do now know a lot more about biosolids-borne microbes.  A series of reports were issued by Dr. Jordan Peccia’s lab at Yale University.  He and his grad students looked far beyond our traditional, regulation-inspired indicator organisms. In Toward a consensus view on the infectious risks associated with land application of sewage sludge he concluded “such analysis demonstrates that the tradition of monitoring pathogen quality by Salmonella spp. and enterovirus content underestimates the infectious risk to the public…”   In Source tracking aerosols released from land-applied class B biosolids during high-wind events, Peccia’s team concluded that “[T]he application of DNA-based source tracking to aerosol samples has confirmed that wind is a possible mechanism for the aerosolization and off-site transport of land-applied biosolids." Further, in Prevalence of Respiratory Adenovirus Species B and C in Sewage Sludge, the researchers asserted “[T]hese findings reinforce the necessity to consider aerosol exposure to sewage-derived pathogens."  But, in terms of actual risk, the evidence seemed to point to exposures not being of great health concern. In  Respiratory Toxicity and Inflammatory Response in Human Bronchial Epithelial Cells Exposed to Biosolids, Animal Manure, and Agricultural Soil Particulate Matter the article “…suggests that an inflammatory aerosol exposure in the TB region could only occur under worst case scenarios…,” which seems relatively benign.

The other major team looking at the microbial content of biosolids and its implication for worker and community health is at the University of Arizona, that of Drs. Ian Pepper and Chuck Gerba.  This team put out the report Pathogens and Indicators in United States Class B Biosolids: National and Historic Distributions, a “major study of the incidence of indicator organisms and pathogens found within Class B biosolids within 21 samplings from 18 wastewater treatment plants across the United States….illustrating that the Part 503 Rule has been effective in reducing public exposure to pathogens relative to 17 yr ago.”  As with the Yale work, this team’s graduate students studied Bioaerosol transport modeling and risk assessment in relation to biosolid placement, concluding that for nearby residents “little risk  of infection from aerosolized bacteria and at no risk from aerosolized viruses.” This works was also reported and confirmed in  Estimation of bioaerosol risk of infection to residents adjacent to a land applied biosolids site using an empirically derived transport model.  When the new assessment tool, QMRA, or quantitative microbial risk assessment, was applied to manures and biosolids, in Land Application of Manure and Class B Biosolids: An Occupational and Public Quantitative Microbial Risk Assessment, the researchers showed that “decreases in risk were typically over six orders of magnitude beyond 30 d. Nearly all risks were reduced to below 10−4 when using a 4-mo harvest delay for crop consumption.” These confirmed the effectiveness of Part 503 management regulations.

What can we say today with these new tools, new studies, new technologies, and new complaints? We still can confidently say that biosolids land application has not proved a significant source of pathogens that cause sickness in workers and communities. This is good, but not sufficient. Odors still provoke panic-related symptoms, so we need to continue our search for improved odor qualities. We should not be shy about offering to respond to claims of ill health effects of biosolids, because some of these reports arise from genuine fears. Class A pathogen treatment vastly reduces risks compared to Class B treatment, so our industry’s move to Class A is wise. Land management practices that prevent windblown dust, incidentally also reducing odorant releases, are always smart.

We know biosolids is safe, but our public does not. We need to go beyond our rational brain and toward our emotional nature, our heart, and follow our nose. Even the safest biosolids by any other name is Still Not a Rose.

Biosolids Truth

We now have a word for it!

I read in the Washington Post (11/16/2016) that the Oxford Dictionaries recorded a 2000% increase in this word’s usage between 2015 and 2016, with the Brexit referendum in the UK and the Trump-Clinton campaign in the U.S.   Oxford’s international word of the year for 2016 is: “post-truth.”

Oxford defines post-truth as: “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

Oxford explains that “the ‘post-‘ prefix doesn't mean ‘after’ so much as it implies an atmosphere in which a notion is irrelevant.” It further notes that “post-truth” captures the “ethos, mood or preoccupations of [2016].”

Facts are irrelevant?  I don’t need to get into a political debate to explain to all of you biosolids practitioners what post-truth feels like. We experience post-truth frequently in debates over recovering resource value from our biosolids. I feel I will be using “post-truth” frequently going forward, perhaps more to myself than to our critics.

That is why the MABA annual symposium in Wilmington, Delaware, provided so great a respite from post-truth in its many manifestations, when we were treated to the truth-telling of 15 experts on a wide range of biosolids truth. I want to review half of these truth-telling presentations this week, and the rest in the subsequent News.

I don’t think anyone attending the symposium wasn’t blown away by the magic of Dr. Jeffrey Buyer’s presentation (The role of microbes on soil health and questions for biosolids research) on soil microbes. For me, one of the very astonishing slides, one that still has my head shaking, involved graphical representations of the microbial population diversity in human waste versus the microbial communities in the sewage in sewer pipe versus the communities in biosolids. The microbial profiles were entirely different!  The biosolids truth: microbial populations we flush to the sewer bear almost no similarity to those in biosolids.  Who knew? 

Another point I took away from Dr. Buyer’s presentation was the resilience of soil microbial ecosystems. They preserve their characteristic microbial biome structure through drought, cultivation, fertilization and biosolids. There is one caveat, drawn from manure research, that repeated biosolids applications, over time, might be altering soil microbial communities. I find this a reassuring notion, for some reason, and one we can hope to support with future research.  Check out Dr. Buyer’s presentation, and see for yourself this biosolids truth: biosolids constitutes a microbiome, the effects of which on soil is unexplored.

We experimented with teleconferencing speakers from remote locations. One prize presentation (Results of the National Sewage Sludge Repository at Arizona State University: Contaminant Prioritization, Human Health Implications and Opportunities for Resource Recovery) was from a newly minted PhD at Arizona State University, Dr. Venkatesan. He presented the work he has done over the past 5 years, along with Dr. Rolf Halden, on the National Sewage Sludge Repository. The repository is the collections of representative biosolids sample taken during the several rounds of testing by the US EPA some 15 years ago. Dr Venkatesan analyzed these for persistent organic pollutants.  We celebrated with him the removal by the FDA of triclocan and triclocarban from consumer products this past year.  We learned this biosolids truth: FDA’s ban of triclosan and triclocarban will eliminate 60 % of persistent pollutant loadings in biosolids.

Dr Venkatesan had a bold proposal for us. He asserts that biosolids is very much like the human being, in that it contains lipids that capture from daily exposure lipophilic contaminants in food, water and consumer products. Biosolids could be an early warning material for exposures to pollutants, one that is more immediate than a post mortem evaluation of you or me. The biosolids truth: biosolids contains a large array of chemicals that are markers of human exposure.

Phosphorus was a VERY BIG DEAL in the two-day symposium.  Trudy Johnston had arranged participation by regulators from Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland and Virginia, each states with phosphorus contributions to the Chesapeake Bay and with programs to reduce flows of phosphorus to the Bay.  Dr. Herschell Elliott of Penn State University provided in his presentation (Will phosphorus scuttle biosolids land application? ) the scientific basis for a nuanced approaches to the effects of soil phosphorus loadings. But to place the issue in the context of the politics of inter-state management, Synagro’s John Uzupis described  (An agronomic review of phosphorus in biosolids and how it relates to the Chesapeake Bay States of Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia ) the likely regulatory path. The biosolids truth: regulation of phosphorus at wastewater plants continues to be the easier path for regulators than control of farmland losses.

For me the bottom line is the faster we embrace technologies to extract P from wastewater influent or from sludge solids, the better we will be from a biosolids application standpoint.  This point circles back to Dr. Venkatesan’s presentation, when he tells this biosolids truth: biosolids is a valuable source of phosphorus and deserves recovery.  Dr. Venkatesan reported on the work of his ASU colleague, Paul Westerhoff, on calculating the value of biosolids (Characterization, Recovery Opportunities, and Valuation of Metals in Municipal Sludges from U.S. Wastewater Treatment Plants Nationwide). This study give a high commodity value to P among a large array of other elements.  Though the crisis is not yet upon us, at least not nearly as closely as climate change, the threat of future global P shortages genuinely warrant action today.

Yes, biosolids can be complicated, with a swirl of issues, such as persistent pollutants and phosphorus, yet science holds out, with hope and vigor, the possibility of TRUTH.  This will be the only way we can get beyond biosolids post-truth, with relentless commitment to Biosolids Truth.

ESP vd EPS

In this season of ghosts and goblins, slime seems always to be an appropriate prop. In my very first professional presentation to a biosolids forum, an IWA conference in Los Angeles in 1989, I used a literary device, as I am wont to do, for my speech. I used a silly children’s book I had for my boys that described the many uses of Slugs. I, of course, transmogrified this conversation to one about “sludge,” in a sort of Gilda Radner’s Emily Litella “never mind” riff popular several decades ago on Saturday Night Live (see my favorite on Violins on TV).  But, really, the connection between slugs and sludge is more than onomatopoetic and more than a “d.”

One thing slugs and sludge have in common is “slime.” And slime is a lot more complicated and engaging upon second reflection than upon first, and certainly deserving of deep study.  

In the case of slugs, I learned in The Biochemistry and Mechanics of Gastropod Adhesive Gels just how complex is the trail mucus of a terrestrial slug. If you have ever inadvertently stepped on one, “slime” takes on real meaning. But to malacologists it is a gel with a dilute polymer mixture that contains a specific glue protein that crosslinks with other polymers, providing the adhesive properties necessary for snail locomotion. This “trail mucus” slime may very well may hold the secrets of future strong, flexible adhesives. Who knew?

So, what do we NOT know about slime in biosolids? A whole lot less, I think, than we need to know. Slime may be the key to digestibility, dewaterability, energy recovery and odors, a sort of biosolids form of the “four horsemen of the apocolyse” (another Halloween allusion.)

The slime I am referring to is a part of the emerging science of EPS, or extracellular polymeric substances. (This is not a mystical, Halloween season nod to ESP, or extrasensory perception.) How EPS in biosolids changes with treatment before, during and after sludge digestion is key to the quality of the final product. By quality I mean, at the end of the treatment process, does the product look and smell like a lump of p__p, or does it look and smell like garden soil?

Scientists are doing some amazing work on the EPS in sludge. EPS is released by microbial cells during either anaerobic or aerobic treatment processes. EPSs come in several forms. In the paper Effect of proteins, polysaccharides, and particle sizes on sludge dewaterability, EPS is separated into “four fractions: (1) slime, (2) loosely bound extracellular polymeric substances (LB-EPS), (3) tightly bound EPS (TB-EPS), and (4) pellet.” EPSs are very complex and their role in creating stable flocs, their influence on dewaterability, and the impacts of different treatment on their characteristics have been difficult for scientist to tease apart. Extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) of microbial aggregates in biological wastewater treatment systems: A review concluded: “the knowledge regarding EPS is far from complete and much work is still required to fully understand their precise roles in the biological treatment process.”

Slime is in many ways a positive component of EPS. The journal article Extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) producing bacterial strains of municipal wastewater sludge: Isolation, molecular identification, EPS characterization and performance for sludge settling and dewatering concluded: “The slime EPS was better for bioflocculation….” Against this flocculation role, slime is a negative for dewatering, and a research focus is on how treatments alter the slime. In the Effect of proteins, polysaccharides, and particle sizes on sludge dewaterability, we are told that “During hydrolysis and acidification, PN [protein] was transferred from the pellet and TB-EPS [tightly bound-EPS] fractions to the slime fraction… Further investigation suggested that CST [capillary suction time] was affected by soluble PN…, “ which is not a positive attribute.

Some creative research is in full swing to modify EPS. A bioengineer, S Kavitha, at Anna University in India, entered full force in 2014 the science literature with studies examining an array of biological and chemical approaches to altering the EPS of sludges to achieve improved processes. Her focus has been primarily on the digestibility and dewaterability of waste activated sludge (WAS). She has examined different additives for breaking up EPS-controlled flocs in WAS to expose them to biological decomposition:

• NaCl (Enhancing the functional and economical efficiency of a novel combined thermo chemical disperser disintegration of waste activated sludge for biogas production)
• Thermo-chemical (Enhancing the functional and economical efficiency of a novel combined thermo chemical disperser disintegration of waste activated sludge for biogas production)
• MgCl2 (Achieving profitable biological sludge disintegration through phase separation and predicting its anaerobic biodegradability by non linear regression model)
• Citric acid (Improving the amenability of municipal waste activated sludge for biological pretreatment by phase-separated sludge disintegration method)
• Surfactants (Upgrading the hydrolytic potential of immobilized bacterial pretreatment to boost biogas production)

But Kavitha is far from alone in studying ways of altering EPS. Researchers from other groups have recently given us these papers:

• Effects of short-time aerobic digestion [STAD] on extracellular polymeric substances and sludge features of waste activated sludge found that “The sludge after STAD exhibited better flocculability and dewaterability than that after the prolonged aerobic digestion.
• Variations in distribution and composition of extracellular polymeric substances (EPS) of biological sludge under potassium ferrate conditioning: Effects of pH and ferrate dosage found that “The results indicated that sludge dewaterability was improved by decreasing solution pH [with potassium ferrate] in terms of filtration rate and cake solids content.”

We even have two new terms of art describing biological approaches to biosolids processing -- bioleaching and biodrying.

The term “bioleaching” is applied to a biological approach to conditioning biosolids for dewatering. Bioleaching involves inoculating WAS with specialized bacterium, along with an effusion of iron, to chew up the EPS, and hence improving dewaterability. Researchers are looking at Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans -- Fate of extracellular polymeric substances of anaerobically digested sewage sludge during pre-dewatering conditioning with Acidithiobacillus ferrooxidans culture.  This paper had four highlights: “Rapid flocculation of sewage sludge was achieved using iron-oxidizing bacteria; A. ferrooxidans biogenic flocculant significantly improved the sludge dewatering; a rapid reduction of EPS content was achieved during sludge flocculation; and, a positive correlation between EPS reduction and sludge dewaterability was observed.” This all sounds great.

Other researchers report on “biodrying.” In the paper Structure modification and extracellular polymeric substances conversion during sewage sludge biodrying process the authors claim “62% of total water removal [in a ]thermophilic phase ... transforming bound water to free water and modify(ing) the sludge structure and improves dewaterability.” This approach has already leaped to the commercial side. It was presented as the BioDryer reactor at the WEF Intensification of Resource Recovery conference in August 2015 by BioForceTech Corporation.

Uniting these approaches to altering biosolids properties is the deployment of biological, in contrast to mechanical, processes to reduce EPS in sludges and drive physical properties in favorable directions of digestibility and dewaterability.

This brings me back to one of the mysteries of my early days in biosolids, back to my “never mind” word play with slugs and sludge, and back to the day before “biosolids.” I wondered then why was the Chicago air-lagooned biosolids so pleasant and why was Tacoma’s Tagro such a great product? Perhaps what we didn’t know then, and what we are learning today, is that those processes chewed up the EPS effectively, with a big payback. I asked back then why was Philadelphia’s biosolids compost so gummy and I ask today why is the thermally hydrolyzed biosolids surprisingly pungent? Perhaps what we still don’t know today is how to chew up the EPS effectively.

We are still very early on the learning curve with EPS, so when we do learn what we need to learn, I am betting that we will then be close to describing a “high quality biosolids” product. Then our EPS will be transmogrified into ESP, an Extra Special Product.